(2011)
HE ARRIVED SO EARLY that he actually called the restaurant from the sidewalk outside, asking if he might move his reservation up from 1:15 to 1:00 P.M.
“I’ll try to work you in,” the hostess said.
Good. To be sitting there calmly would be best. It wouldn’t do to arrive after her, nervous and sweating. Nor would it do to arrive together, for he knew from her profile that she was taller than he was—she was five ten against his five nine and a half.
Once inside the restaurant, he glanced into the downstairs dining room. He’d intended to offer her dinner, but his brother, Angelo, warned him away from such ostentation. Dinner at Chez Panisse was too much, Angelo’d said, like buying a house when all he really needed was an apartment. He thought about calling Angelo now to tell him about the reservation change, but when he took out his phone, he remembered Angelo’s last bit of advice—“Be with this woman, Bert, don’t be elsewhere”—and powered the thing off once and for all. Or until he was on his way home anyway.
When he walked upstairs to the café section, the hostess sat him in a waiting area and gave him a glass of sauvignon blanc when he asked for one. He would have another with lunch. Two glasses of slowly sipped wine was an accoutrement to conversation. Angelo had said that, too, but when he also said, “Like a belt holds up your pants, the wine will keep your face from falling down,” Angela, Bert’s sister-in-law, had shut Angelo up, kissing Bert and wishing him luck. Bert had met Angela first. He’d introduced her to his brother, and the rest had been years and years of sorrow on the one hand and gloating on the other.
“We can seat you now if the rest of your party will be here soon,” said the hostess.
Those were her words, but her look said, Why don’t we seat you, get your back against the wall so you can have some support?
She gave him the warmest of smiles, but was he that transparent? He’d been here twice before with dates but fully believed he’d been invisible. He walked behind her, not glancing at the other diners. His table (for two) was in a line of three such tables with not much space between them. He would have to remember to keep his voice down—another bit of Angelo’s advice—and also not to eavesdrop.
“It really just floored me. I mean, forty grand a semester? Why couldn’t she stay right here and go to Berkeley?” said the woman at the next table. It was as if she were his date and had chosen those words as an opening line, since he knew the subject well, having taught at Berkeley for the last twenty years. It made him think that, far from not eavesdropping, perhaps he should engage these lunch neighbors. Wouldn’t it make him look at ease if his actual date saw him listening to the opinions of others and giving advice? When he turned toward the woman and peaked his bushy eyebrows at her, however, he saw immediately that she didn’t even know he’d sat down. He also saw that half his wine was gone, and put a finger on the rim of his glass. He ate a piece of bread, then swept its crumbs onto his lap, though a waiter stood nearby with a crumb scraper.
SHE FOUND A PARKING SPACE A BLOCK AWAY, bought two hours’ worth of parking from a nearby machine, and put the receipt on her dashboard. She didn’t suppose she’d need two hours, but if the date turned out well and she lingered, she wouldn’t want to get a ticket and spoil things. She’d had eleven Internet dates and told herself that she would quit at an even dozen. And, of course, a last date should not be rushed, somewhat like a last supper.
She was early, too, so walked past Chez Panisse twice. On every previous date, she had promised herself two things: to pretend that each was her first and to say what she thought, not what she guessed her date might wish to hear. She’d spent nine years pretending to interests she didn’t have with Steve. That her marriage had ended in widowhood, not divorce, in fact, had forced her to pretend again. This time to the success of it.
During her first three Internet dates, she’d caught herself not only talking about her marriage but presenting the men with the very version of herself that Steve had invented, or, more fairly, that she had invented when trying to make Steve happy. She didn’t mean to begrudge him…. Steve had had his good side, which, if she remembered correctly, was his left. She laughed as a man came along the sidewalk toward her. When he looked at her, his eyebrows peaked, like the roofs of the birdhouses her father used to build up in Tacoma.
WHEN HE SAW HER MOVING across the dining room toward him, he stood up too quickly, knocking the table with his thighs. Some of his water sloshed out, but he’d drunk enough of his wine that it only frowned up the inside of its glass and then settled back down, somewhat like the grouchy expression she was trying to hide. She had already given him the nickname “Birdie,” because of his eyebrows. He needed one of those hair clipper things she’d seen advertised on TV, not only for his eyebrows but also for his ears and the portals of his nose. He looked very Italian, though it said on his profile that he was only Italian on his father’s side. Not that she minded … She liked Italians just fine.
“I’ll have one of those,” she told the hostess, pointing at the wine.
“Sauvignon blanc,” said he, lest the hostess had forgotten.
“You’d better be Bert,” she said. “I mean, what if you weren’t? Wouldn’t that be funny? What if you were some other Internet guy waiting for someone else?”
She couldn’t help thinking, Would that it were so.
“I’m Bert to most people, Alberto to the members of my family,” he said. “You know what I do whenever I get a little free time? I make my own salami.”
Shoot me now, he told himself, while she thought, What if I called him Birdie out loud? He might think it was Bertie, a twelfth-date diminutive, an excessive amount of cuteness spilling out.
“Well, I’m Liz, though I used to be Mary,” she said. “To my family, I’m Mary Elizabeth. My mother says I’m working my way down the syllables of my names, so I guess Beth is next.”
She thought that was clever, and waited for him to acknowledge it. This didn’t have to be a disaster, did it? But he was still in mourning over that salami comment. “I’m Bert,” he said again, his eyebrows so evenly flatlining now that they looked like someone’s just-clipped hedge.
Her wine arrived before she was properly seated, and when she scooted herself in, a bit of it sloshed out onto the tablecloth, making a Rorschach rabbit, she swore. Was this what they’d have in common? Thigh butts and sloshings, fat legs rocking the table? Not that her legs were fat; they were exactly what they had been when she was twenty.
“Your profile said you moved down here recently,” he said. “How’s it going so far? I’ve been here for twenty years myself.”
He could feel himself pushing, and placed his fingers on the stem of his wineglass. She was actually prettier than her profile photos. When did that ever happen? Angela had told him that he looked like Tony Curtis in his profile photo, while Angelo said he looked more like General Curtis Lamay. Angelo was a World War II historian and also taught at Berkeley. Angelo had bullets from the Battle of the Bulge on his desk, which was what he’d been fighting all these years, Angela said.
“It’s an experiment, moving here,” she said. “I thought I could leave Tacoma behind, but I’ve brought it with me. Any fool could have guessed that would happen, but I’m not any fool. As you can see, I’m a very specific one.”
Neither of them had any idea what that meant, but it was certainly true that Tacoma sat within her like a bullfrog on a lily pad, croaking away. Now, however, it was her turn to ask him something. That was the unwritten rule of Internet dating. “Have you ever thought of buying one of those rotating eyebrow cutters?” came to mind, but she said instead, “Your profile listed your field as organic chemistry. When I was in college, organic chemistry used to scare the living shit out of me.”
She paused, sorry for “living shit,” then added, “You know, I have this theory that scientists often know the arts but that artists never know the sciences. Would you say that’s true? Tell me something artistic, why don’t you?”
She pressed the fingers of both her hands into the tablecloth. She’d never thought of herself as mean, but there it was.
“Actually, I think Beth suits you better than Mary or Liz,” he said. “You have the softness of the th around your eyes.”
He’d been thinking of saying that the whole time she’d been talking. He’d never said anything remotely flirtatious on his other dates, but Angela had told him just that morning to loosen up, to tell the woman she was pretty if he thought so, to tell her whatever came to mind.
When she peaked her own eyebrows at him, he said, “In chemistry Th stands for thorium. It was discovered in 1828 by Jöns Jacob Berzelius of Sweden. He named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder.”
“Glad you cleared that up for me, or I might have thought he named it after John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” said Liz or Mary or Beth.
Oh God, she had to stop this. None of it was his fault. Except, of course, for the outdated photos on his profile. There ought to be a rule about those, some sort of statute of limitations. She said rather wistfully, “You’ve never been married, have you?”
“Married to my profession” was his usual reply, but something in the way she’d made fun of Jöns Jacob Berzelius made him turn off the tape recorder in his head. What did it matter what she thought of him?
“I had a close call once with the woman who is now my sister-in-law,” he said, “but she chose Angelo and now we’re friends. That is, not Angelo and I but Angela and I.”
“Here’s to close calls,” she said, once more raising her glass. She reached across the table and tapped his wrist, as if saying, Hello in there, hello? Can we not both simply stop this, act like human beings for once in our lives?
“What about you?” he asked. “Are you still in love with your dead husband?”
THEIR WAITER HAD COME BY TWICE, so they fell into a moment’s silence, both of them staring at their menus. The two hours of parking she had purchased now seemed to her like a prison sentence, while he decided he would let loose the force of his personality on her soon, which Angela always said was his great secret weapon. Their waiter loomed above them like a dirigible, so he asked for the daily special—an edible schoolyard garden salad, followed by spicy Monterey Bay squid roasted in a wood oven with chickpeas—while she decided on the yogurt-and-cucumber soup, then pan-fried sea bass, which didn’t sound good but seemed to be the dish that most reminded her of this man. She smiled but felt meaner than she’d felt since Steve died. She had no idea what gave her this urge to make fun of him.
“They don’t call it ‘Chilean’ sea bass here,” she said once the waiter had left. “‘Chilean’ is code for ‘unsustainable,’ and an absolute no-no in this place.”
She’d read up on Chez Panisse, and gave him a genuine smile.
“Do you think the actual Chile will turn out to be as unsustainable as its bass?” he asked. “I mean, one never knows with these fledgling democracies.”
He felt like slapping his face. God what an imbecile he was! That wasn’t letting loose the power of his personality but simply saying something banal! Everything he knew about Chile he had learned when watching TV coverage of the coal mine disaster. He didn’t know how “fledgling” their democracy was, wasn’t even absolutely sure it was a democracy.
“I sure hope not,” she said. “I like their wine and I want it to keep on coming.”
There, she had said something equally dumb. She thought to ask him if he believed the final t in Pinochet to be spoken or silent—to say that it, along with how to say Qatar, seemed to cause havoc with journalists around the world. But instead, she simply let him try to read her look, which didn’t have any meanness in it for once.
“That science and the arts thing you said a moment ago,” he said. “I think so, too, though it might seem arrogant of me to say it. But I wanted to ask, are you an artist, then, saying it in self-deprecation? If you are, you didn’t say so on your profile.”
He picked up the saltshaker, lining it up with the pepper mill. He clicked them together at their bases, making them do a little dance. He thought of that scene in Fiddler on the Roof where the Russians and the Jews had a dancing contest.
“If someone says he’s a scientist … if he truly is a scientist, then, by definition, there is a world of study behind it,” she said. “But to throw the word artist around is easy, don’t you think? About like choosing yellow or blue from one’s paint palette. The only thing worse than calling oneself an artist is calling oneself a poet. Or maybe artist is worse, I don’t know.”
My God, he had had that thought, too! He distrusted many of those in the arts for just that reason.
“Are you a painter?” he asked. He let his eyes move down to her hands, looking for flecks of paint.
“In Tacoma, I was in sales. For a long time Jaguars, and for another long time real estate,” she said. “But yes, I’ll admit to painting now. At least behind closed doors. Painter, I can live with; artist, I cannot.”
“It seems to me that when doors are closed, we don’t have to clothe ourselves like we do when they are open,” he said. “What are your paintings like? Can you describe them for me?”
He moved the saltshaker and pepper mill apart, then danced them back together, no longer Russians, but in the kind of do-si-do of a square-dance couple. He didn’t think of what he’d said as showing her the power of his personality, since he’d just come right out and said it, but he could tell the comment impressed her. And, indeed, she thought “when doors are closed, we don’t have to clothe ourselves like we do when they are open,” was exactly like something she might say. She had even written something like it in her profile. Was he reciting it back to her? Surely not. Oh, she had to stop this! Why was she suspicious of this man? Maybe she’d have a thirteenth date, end on a higher note, call it a baker’s dozen.
When their first course came—his garden salad and her yogurt-and-cucumber soup—she finally gave some serious thought to his question. What were her paintings like? Could she paint one of them for him now using words? In sales, one obviously sold something. Would talking about her paintings therefore be selling herself, or would it be letting him see the clothes she wore when she was behind closed doors?
He took a bite of his salad and watched her. She reminded him of some of the graduate students he had had over the years, women who saw only chemical equations when they looked at him. She was far too beautiful for him, no question about that, but where did her beauty reside? Could he isolate it? In chemistry, in order to understand a reaction when many reactants were involved, the order of reaction was determined by isolation. In female beauty, then, in her particular beauty, what was the order of his reaction? Did it commence with the wonderful width of her mouth, the perfect smallness of her nose, or the dark and inquisitive eyes that darted about above them both?
When he said, “Mmm, fresh vegetables” out of absolutely nowhere, Farmer McGregor came into her mind, sneaking up on Peter Rabbit, and she looked at the tablecloth to see if her wine Rorschach rabbit was gone. It was not, but it had faded out of its rabbitness, was now actually something like the painting she’d been working on that morning: lines and squiggles, dark white on light white and falling dimly away from any representative reality. She decided that if it stayed there beyond their first course, she would not only tell him about her paintings but tell him everything she could think to tell him about herself, no holds barred. It was her final Internet date after all, unless she decided on a baker’s dozen.
She picked up her spoon, slid it beneath the surface of her yogurt-and-cucumber soup, and lifted it to her mouth. When the soup’s flavor hit her, she closed her eyes. “Lord, this is good!” she managed to say, while for him the closing of her eyes isolated them, proving that her beauty did not reside there, or not only there, at least. That the rest of her face, undone by the startling flavor, looked deranged, made him think of what she might look like during sex. But her beauty was not diminished in the slightest.
“In milk, there are two types of proteins,” he said. “Casein and whey. When the milk goes sour, it curdles. The coagulating part is casein, and the watery substance is whey. It’s a bit like the Indian dish raita, wouldn’t you say?”
He was talking about her soup and she knew it.
“What I would say is it’s fab-u-lous,” she said. “Muy fabuloso.”
She was ready to spoon some of the soup into his mouth, and had it not been for the sudden intrusion of Spanish, she would have done it. But muy fabuloso? Where had that come from? She’d never studied Spanish, not even in high school.
“Très fantastique!” he said. “Très magnifique!”
He looked at the saltshaker and pepper mill, thinking to turn them into French balladeers, but he kept his hands to himself.
“When I was a child, I used to love to paint clouds,” she told him, “and I paint clouds these days, too. Not big puffy ones and not rain clouds, either. These days, they are unrepresentative; they’re the clouds within my head.”
That wasn’t as good as his “when doors are closed” thing, but it wasn’t half bad. And it was true. She thought to say she painted clouds from both sides now, but decided it would be trite.
“Unrepresentative clouds,” he said. “Sort of like petri dish formations.”
She took another spoonful of soup. Très magnifique! Muy fabuloso! “Yeah,” she said. “I guess so.”
“I have a painting by Agnes Martin at home,” he told her. “There is this little scrap of paper on its back, on which someone wrote, ‘I can see humility, delicate and white…. It is satisfying just by itself.’ I like to think that the writer of that note was also Agnes Martin. It has come to mean as much to me as the painting.”
She looked from his eyebrows to the mottled fields of his cheeks, his nose like a dangerous ski jump. I can see humility, delicate and white…. He was not only not attractive; he was actively unattractive. His face seemed made from the leftover parts of a child’s discarded Mr. Potato Head.
“I know Agnes Martin,” she said. And then she said, “Tell me something. Where did you hang that painting? I mean, where exactly is it in your house?”
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t hang it,” he said. “It’s sitting on my couch, staring out at me like some kind of abstract, uninvited guest.”
Damn. Everything he said was better than what she could come up with. “You don’t mean to say over your couch, but on it? Correct?”
He’d made that perfectly clear, but she wanted it perfectly clear again.
“On the couch,” he said. “Yes.”
“What’s the painting’s name?” she asked. “And what does it look like?”
“I don’t think it’s supposed to look like anything, but to me it looks like a piece of blank sheet music. Its name is Acrylic on canvas. From 1997. It’s not a very good name.”
She wanted to say that she would like to see the painting, not as code that the date was going well but because she really wanted to see it. An Agnes Martin. On his couch. Not over it. She imagined his ears as the sheet music’s treble clefs when he stood in front of his couch looking at it. Treble clefs with two sharps after it, like the tufts of hair coming out of his ears. So what key was that? Two treble clefs as seen from the back. That is, if sheet music could have two treble clefs.
“I think I know that painting,” she said. “It’s gray on gray, like even though the sheet music hasn’t been written on, it’s been waiting to be written on for quite a long time?”
“Why, yes,” he said. “It’s exactly like that.”
He flatlined his eyebrows again.
Waiting to be written on for quite some time …
He wanted to ask if she’d like to come write on it right that second, but of course they had only finished their soup and salad.
WHEN HE DELIVERED THEIR MAIN COURSE, the waiter said, “Sea bass and squid are nothing alike, but they live together in the same stretch of ocean,” causing them both to believe he was making reference to their unlikeliness as a couple. The waiter’s flourish when placing the dishes down convinced her that she was wrong, that it was just something he said, but Bert felt insulted. Très insulted. Like d’Artagnan. The waiter needed a lesson in manners.
“I think what they really do is swim at the same depth,” she said. “And I also think that one eats the other, since I often used plastic squid as bait when I went fishing at home.”
To her surprise, Bert laughed, his facial parts collapsing into congress. “Fishing?” he said. “I used to go fishing with my dad.”
She took a bite of her sea bass, which was nearly as good as the yogurt-and-cucumber soup, but she was on guard against another Spanish outburst. “And I with mine, but we never fished for bass,” she said. “Salmon was our goal, cod our consolation prize.”
He looked at his squid, a consolation prize against the size of her bass. When he took a tentative bite, what got to him first was its texture, which was firm but not tough, the little squid bodies and the little squid tentacles cooked to perfection. When the taste came to him half a second later, it was like a second chance to make a first impression. Squid weren’t handsome, either. With their weirdly elongated bodies and capped heads, they looked, in fact, like uncircumcised penises, three of which graced his plate. His propensity to eat fast, Angela told him, was her first indication that she would choose Angelo, who ate as slowly as a cow chewing its cud. But before he remembered that and stopped himself, he’d already eaten two of the squid, the last one cowering on his plate.
She, however, was in a sea bass heaven…. “Splendid, splendid, splendid,” she said. “What a place to bring me! I’ll tell you one thing, of all my dates so far, this is …”
She was going to say “the best restaurant,” but stopped, worried that “What a place to bring me!” assumed that he would pay. Had she actually accented the bring? On each of her previous dates, they’d split the bill, and they would this time, too. Also, to say that of all her dates so far this was the best restaurant could be taken to mean that the date itself was nowhere near the best she’d had, and that wasn’t quite true, not because she saw a future with him but because, well, because she was having fun. She said, “My paintings aren’t like clouds on a normal day. They aren’t like clouds during rain, nor are they like clouds during thunderstorms. They’re not …”
“They are not cumulus, cirrus, stratus, or nimbus,” he said. “It’s cloud’s illusions you recall, you really don’t know clouds at all.”
At first, she stared at him blankly, then somewhat coldly, as if he were making fun. But she hadn’t spoken a line from that song aloud earlier; she was sure she’d only thought it.
“They’re cloud primal screams,” she said, “like some of those early Coltrane solos. But they’re still clouds, my friend, and I do know them.”
She played with her carrots, lining them up above what remained of the sea bass like eighth notes for the Agnes Martin painting. She nearly said more about early Coltrane, but she had learned about Coltrane from Steve, and she didn’t want Steve to have a spot at the table.
“No,” she said. “I got that wrong. They aren’t like primal screams but more like primal shouts, calming into primal conversations, I hope.”
He thought that was absolutely brilliant.
“I know I’m not supposed to ask this,” he said. “But ‘calming into primal conversations …’ Is that what we are doing now?”
Goddamn he’s good, she thought, but she said, “You’re certainly not supposed to say it.” She tapped her wineglass. “Two more sauvignon blancs?”
Should she have said sauvignons blanc? Did it work like attorneys general? “I’m an easy drunk,” she said. “Oops, I mean a cheap one.”
But that was wrong, too, since the wine was fourteen bucks a glass.
“Angela reminded me not to eat too fast,” he said. “She said that the last thing a woman wants to see is me gobbling down my food.”
“That Angela,” she said. “I hope you thanked your brother properly.”
For a while they ate and drank slowly, both adhering to Angela’s rule. When he took a bite of his last squid, she took a sip of her wine, and when she returned to her sea bass, he put his wineglass to his mouth. Their arms and hands moved in awkward unison, like the pincers of a crab after a stroke. For ten minutes this went on, their eyes and thoughts lively but every other part of them like wary drivers going through a school zone.
When the noises of the room came back to them, they heard a woman at a nearby table actually say, “Eat slowly, Peter,” and that made them smile, as if eating fast had once been an issue with them, which they had long ago solved.
“AN APRICOT TART WITH CHANTILLY CREAM,” he told the waiter. “Two spoons, and … what do you think? Two coffees?”
“I’d love a cup of coffee,” she said, “but unless you’re ambidextrous, we won’t be needing two spoons. I’m not much for sweets.”
“You think you’re not,” he said. “But this is a special occasion.”
They had been there for ninety-seven minutes and most of the other diners were gone. When she asked the waiter if he recommended the apricot tart, he swooned like Cupid had just shot him through the heart. When he was gone, she said, “I’ll eat some if you can tell me what Chantilly cream is. Otherwise, you’re on your own.”
“It’s a light whipped cream with vanilla or brandy added,” he said. “A sort of liquid version of Chantilly lace, I guess you could say.”
He briefly thought to tell her its chemical formula, but he did not. Angelo always brought up history, always told people historical facts whenever anyone mentioned anything at all.
When the dessert arrived, almost instantly, it looked deflated, as if some dessert bully had pushed it down in its tart pan. It also looked old, its texture as mottled as the skin on his cheeks. The cream was not filigreed across the tart’s top, either, like his Chantilly lace comment made her believe, but formed a small white pond beside it, like a long-unused swimming hole beside an ancient dock, forgotten since the kids grew up.
“Never judge a book by its cover,” he said. “It might be a cliché, but that’s what Angela did, and for a while I figured that’s what you were doing, too, but you’re not.”
His look was so intense, the blue of his eyes so bore into her, that at first she didn’t know what to do, except to quell the sudden urge to get up and leave the table. But when she found herself calling them “cobalt” blue, his eyes, she understood as clearly as if she had been one of them that this was the look he gave his organic chemistry students while they stared through their microscopes at life’s most elemental parts. No, she was not going to judge a book by its cover. She was going to judge it by reading it, and that would take more than just this one dumb date.
They didn’t eat the apricot tart until their coffee came. A couple of weeks earlier, she had dined alone at the recommendation of a friend, at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place on San Francisco’s Kearny Street. The food had been a disappointment, but when her fortune cookie came, it said, “Don’t dine alone! Hell is not other people,” and she’d kept it. She decided to tell him that now, so he could let her know that it was a play on the famous Jean-Paul Sartre line, thus providing a bit more evidence that scientists knew art. But when she opened her mouth, he put a spoonful of apricot tart with Chantilly cream in it.
“Just one bite,” he said. “Think of it as chumming for salmon.”
Like the yogurt-and-cucumber soup before it, the apricot tart demolished not only her face but all of the sinewy mess that her life had been until just about that moment.
He took his own bite of tart, letting its fabulous flavor unglue his rough features, until he looked to her like one of those early Cubist Picasso things that she had seen at SFMOMA on the same day she had gone to the Chinese place. Hell is not other people.
“Do you want to go to a movie?” she asked. “Or maybe sit in the park and listen to jazz?”
“Early Coltrane?” he asked.
“Actually, I like the straighter stuff,” she said. “I am partial to early Nat King Cole. I even read his biography once.”
When they left Chez Panisse, the weather had turned, not cooling down but warming up. He shrugged and said, “Sometimes you need a jacket, sometimes you don’t.”
When they got to her car, there was a ticket on its windshield. Two hours and five minutes she’d been gone.
Plus, of course, the twenty years in sales.